If you didn’t grow up in generational poverty, it can be difficult to understand the issues, obstacles, and hidden rules people living in poverty deal with every day. And when you lack understanding, it can lead to various problems.
You might think you shouldn’t do anything to help because all they need to do is just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” which is not the case for many people. Or, on the other hand, you might want to help, but you end up doing so in ways that can actually hurt the people you’re trying to help, even though you have the best of intentions.
The following books will open readers’ minds to the realities of poverty in America and similar countries in the developed world. Some do delve into alleviating poverty in developing countries, but for the most part, the focus of these books is on poverty in America.
Some of these books about poverty provide general understanding, others lay out best practices for school and/or community involvement and engagement, and still others warn of the dangers of helping without understanding the deeper issues. Without exception, the book titles are self-explanatory.
If you were to only choose one of these books to read, my suggestion is the first one below: A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne.
Click on the book covers to go to the Amazon product page and find out more information. Continue reading “Books to Help You Understand Poverty (and How to Alleviate It)”
As adults, we know forgiveness is a virtue we all need to cultivate, but we also realize it’s not easily learned. Kids often have a hard time with it (as do adults!), and they need to have forgiveness modeled to them by the people around them in order to begin to understand the need for and importance of it.
